By Niall Sellar

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The Hotel Hokusai might open with the discovery of a floating corpse, but it is far from a conventional murder mystery. Rather, crime serves as a vehicle for Glasgow-based author T.Y. Garner to examine concepts such as language, identity and otherness through the eyes of his teenage Korean protagonist, Han.

The setting is 1893 Yokohama – at that time Japan’s main ‘treaty port’ and site of the country’s uneasy first encounters with Western culture. Raised by his mother and Scottish missionary stepfather, Han has arrived in the bustling settlement with a letter of introduction to the College of Christ’s Soldiers in the East, only to find that no such institution exists.

 With just the clothes on his back and a dwindling supply of Japanese yen, his innate gift for language enables him to take a job at an eel stand run by grizzled vendor, Yamato. There he meets Archie Nith, a Scottish painter who has been dispatched to Japan for a year by his dealer, and who is residing in Yokohama with real-life Glasgow Boys, Edward Atkinson (‘E.A.’) Hornel and George Henry.

Unlike his fellow Scots, Nith is reluctant to paint a superficial image of the country and has ventured out in search of inspiration that goes beyond the Western public’s desire for simplicity, innocence and restraint. Then comes a shocking discovery.

A young woman, known to Han, washes up on the shore. The police quickly rule death by suicide, but Han is unconvinced. Fuelled by the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, he approaches Nith for help, and together the pair launch their own investigation, a move that will see them scratch deep beneath the surface of Yokohama’s cosmopolitan façade.

The novel is divided into three parts. Han, writing in 1903, relates events in the first and third sections, while Nith takes the reins in between. Or not quite. For, as Han informs the reader on the first page of his account, Nith is missing presumed dead, having disappeared shortly after the pair’s investigation reaches its close.

The second part, then, has been drawn together from Nith’s diary entries. “I’m amazed by how much he recorded in his diary,” Han says. “Of course, I’ve filleted it, cooked it, and added various garnishes, but many of the words are still his.” Elsewhere, we are cautioned that “few stories are as persuasive, or as untrustworthy, as a man’s version of his own life.” Authorship, indeed the very act of writing itself, is a slippery business, Garner seems to suggest.

So, too, of course, the concept of identity, and particularly the way in which it is shaped by language. Garner, whose background is in journalism and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) is interested not only in the stories we bring with us when we start afresh in foreign climes, but in how we go about creating a new identity for ourselves.

For trilingual Han, awaiting the birth of his first child, such questions take on a new layer of complexity: “Should I speak only in Japanese, to avoid confusion, at least until an age where he, or she, can discriminate between different tongues? But . . .no doubt English will afford the greater opportunities in commerce, science, medicine, literature; while Korea is the language of nothing but my heart”.

Identity, it appears, is above all a construction, and never is its potential for artifice made more clear than in the depictions of Japanese domesticity painted by the Glasgow Boys – scenes created for a Western audience that have little to do with the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life in the Japanese port settlement.

The real story is always more complicated. Garner explores the notion that what we see, whether it’s an image or the written word, is inevitably untrustworthy, and it’s perhaps no surprise to find that he cites the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as a major influence.

Stevenson was famously interested in duality, and there are more than a few hints of Jekyll and Hyde as Garner’s investigative duo are confronted with the seedy underbelly that lurks not so very far beneath Yokohama’s veneer of respectability.

Polyglot Han, who inhabits the space between languages and cultures, is a natural guide for readers as they get to grips with a world that is not easily defined; a hybrid place where the boundaries between East and West, between free trade and closed-border isolation, have become blurred beyond distinction.

This sense of hybridity is present not just in Garner’s choice of setting and protagonist but also in his decision to insert a fictional Glasgow Boy into an account that is otherwise meticulously researched. George Henry and E.A. Hornel were both in Yokohama in 1893; Archie Nith, naturally, was not.

The result is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction – though Garner acknowledges using “an enormous amount of creative licence” in his depiction of “H and H”, the artists Henry and Hornel. Is the novel too difficult to define? Perhaps this is Garner himself speaking towards the end of the first section rather than his protagonist Han: “I am well aware that I have wilfully set up the expectation of a narrative about an artist who disappeared and a young woman who was drowned” and “I understand that certain readers . . .may be growing frustrated with the form in which I have constructed this tale.”

The concern is valid but misplaced. Garner has succeeded in bringing a fascinating period in Japan’s history to life; moreover, by deliberately eschewing some of the conventions of “pure” crime, he has created an impressively singular tale. 

The Hotel Hokusai is available from Ringwood Publishing and good booksellers.

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